


frostbite in summer

by marketchippie



Series: frost & fire [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Epistolary, F/M, False Identity, Warden Bethany Hawke
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2018-12-24 03:24:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12003984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: Ravens from the court of Starkhaven bring news to the Inquisition: of the coronation, the threat of war, and the prince's newly appointed ambassador (some say his mistress), an obscure daughter of noble Kirkwall lineage. And a mage.





	1. RAVENS TO THE INQUISITION

  _Ravens, received by the Inquisition’s spymistress:_

  1. Consider the throne of Starkhaven stabilized. The prince of Starkhaven has married the scion of those who sought to depose him. There is to be no civil war in Starkhaven if Sebastian Vael sits the throne with Flora Harriman at his side. The people think well of him.
  2. The old ambassador has been deposed quietly in the night. The new ambassador gives the impression of being very beautiful under her mask—an Orlesian? The prince always was weak for pretty girls and new things. It seems he was not as changed by the Chantry as the old Vael prince might have hoped.
  3. The ambassador of Starkhaven has earned a title among commoners and courtiers alike: an Old Starkhaven honorific, for the scorch-marks her magic leaves behind. They call her _Siocha_ , so they will not have to call her Kirkwallan. It scorches the tongue in place of a name.
  4. The prince makes no attempts to hide her character. On the contrary, he makes a great show of her force nightly. In public, people applaud.



 

* * *

_ A letter, received at the court of Starkhaven, _

 

To our allies, and to the new ambassador,

It is my pleasure to extend our congratulations both to the prince in his restoration and to you for your new appointment. The Inquisition has most graciously received the prince’s courtesies and we are glad of his friendship. Peace in the Free Marches is a dear cause to us all, and in this time of great pain across Thedas we are glad the prince presents a mission of healing.

I was not well acquainted with the last ambassador of Starkhaven, but I would dearly love to rectify this in you. Now that Starkhaven is dear to the inquisition, I would so love to make your acquaintance—not only nation to nation but friend to friend. You are far from us in travel but close in spirit, and if you would but tell me something of your own nature I would feel as if we were sitting down at tea together. We write records of the future at Skyhold as it happens and I would love to know how so young a woman, of such obscure origin and so uniquely powerful, has come to sit beside the throne of a nation foreign to her.

I write to you with an open heart, a ready pen, and everything to offer, my dear. Please let us speak as intimates, as our nations stand hand in hand.

With bright regards for our shared future,

Lady Josephine Montilyet,  
Ambassador of the Inquisition

 

 

_ A note, sent to Skyhold, under the Starkhaven seal, written in an impersonal hand: _

 

Lady Veta Amell, Ambassador of Starkhaven, thanks you kindly for your courtesies.

 

_ The note is stamped with the Amell seal. There is no signature. _

 

* * *

 

_ Birds bring news in scraps. Both papers here carry the shape of having been crumpled, then smoothed again._

  1. The princess consort of Starkhaven is with child. They say the prince is in bed with the ambassador. Why else would he have appointed a foreign woman, and such a dangerous one at that?
  2. The prince readies his troops for battle. The ambassador rides at his side.



 


	2. VARRIC

Finer things are fine when taken in rarely enough to keep them that way, but Varric had never had much affinity for Orlesian wine. Nevertheless, he’s glad to keep drinking the Empress’s finest on the Empress’s dime, albeit far from the Empress’s own company. Far ahead, he can see the Inquisitor’s red jacket, her epaulets catching chandelier-light along the square set of her shoulders, dutiful even as she danced. Sober, visibly, and setting a good example. A hero, admittedly, though not one of the kind of books he liked to write.

How has he found himself here, in this story of good setting itself against evil, of castles in the sky? Kirkwall had not bred heroes like these, reaching toward the sky. Their feet had been on the ground, and he’d liked it that way.

Closing his eyes: the patter and rush of dancing feet might resemble Hawke’s boots, heavy on city cobbles when squaring off against enemies but light when they needed to be. For thieving, for dancing, same thing. Theft of hearts, cities, stories.

Varric doesn’t like to think about him. Varric doesn’t have to think, when he can feel the place he should be. At the head of the party, or the city.

Hawke is gone—every Hawke is gone—but the story keeps calling him back. He had been there when Corypheus was unleashed the first time. That had been Hawke’s doing, Hawke’s monster to put down. That had been Varric leading Hawke along the path. There had been two Hawkes then, even. Little Sunshine, casting fiercely at their side.

Another glass. Fine, then: we see ghosts tonight. Even the finery reminded him of a hunting weekend with the family Hawke, another invitation to the hero of Kirkwall leading to another conspiracy. That roguish, spring-heeled elven heroine drawing her finger along Hawke’s cheek. Every story Hawke put his foot through turned to adventure, to romance, and inevitably to tragedy. Even before the elven woman had betrayed them (this too, an inevitability), tragedy. Hawke, sighing, his calloused fingers on the stem of one of those delicate Orlesian champagne glasses: My mother would have loved this. My sister.

Now Hawke has left his city, or the city has driven him out; he’s out there with Blondie, in the caves.

Now Varric is chasing his ghosts.

It is Vivienne who finds him drinking. Perhaps not the drinking partner he would have chosen, but one he’s glad to have standing beside him. She rests her elbow on the table, the lace of her gown competing with the lace of its cover, and grants him Orlesian party legitimacy simply by breathing at his side. The shadows of her magnificent hat cast over the table, over him.

“You know the bloodlines of Kirkwall,” she says, with little preamble, and he raises an eyebrow. They’re each treading on the other’s soil, then. He wonders who’s tracking Kirkwallan mud onto these marble floors.

He says, “Better than most. How may I help you, Madame de Fer?”

She smiles: she likes titles. The smile is not for him. Her gaze is distracted, her thoughts across the room.

“Amell,” she says. “That’s one of yours.”

He tenses.

Stories come to you if you wait for them, if you anticipate them. Step into the footprints the narrative has left behind and you’ll find yourself on a path well-trodden, and in heroes’ boots if you’re not careful. Varric is careful. But he’s borrowed the boots, in the hope that the hero might come back to claim them.

Hawke’s monster; Hawke’s lineage.

“A venerable name,” he says. “Who dropped it?”

Her smile tightens.

“Some chit that arrived on the prince regent’s of Starkhaven’s arm.”

The champagne glass hits the table, more or less of Varric’s volition. For Andraste’s fucking sake. “Are you implying that Sebastian Vael is _here?_ ”

“Starkhaven has but the one prince regent.” She moves closer, smelling like Orlesian lily and like gunpowder after ignition. The Iron Hand of the Orlesian court, home in her element, elegant and furious. “He’s crowned a new ambassador. Viscount, I know we’re not intimates—”

“Enough to dispense with titles,” he says, swift but (he thinks) unfalteringly, “please.”

“You shred his letters and use them to make sure Josephine’s carrier pigeons have a comfortable nest. That I know. But did you really not know about his new ambassador?”

“I didn’t,” he admits. “What’s the poor bastard put forward now? The maddest hen in the Starkhaven chantry, I don’t wonder—”

“No,” Vivienne says, _seethes_. “Some nobody mistress—”

A laugh hacks its way out of Varric. “So he’s back to his origins. Sad to have missed the change. He wasn’t any fun in Kirkwall.”

“He’s raised up a mage without anything resembling Circle permission,” Vivienne snaps, and Varric goes still. “She’s here on his arm.”

He’s got a type, Varric nearly says—h e’d seen Choirboy’s eyes follow the line of a pretty female body all of once, and she’d been a mage, all right. But she’d been wearing Warden blue, she’d been off-limits, and Varric had supposed that was the thing Choirboy loved most. Well, two things: the Hawke name and being told no.

Bethany Hawke. He hadn’t liked to think of her much. Sunshine, deprived of sunshine. Blight-ridden and trapped in the blue—and dead now, though not on Warden duty. On her brother’s, rather, in the streets of Kirkwall in the battle that had killed so many. Hawke had said she’d come around to the life, that those were her last words to him. To him, maybe, thinks Varric, but he wasn’t there when she died.

Starkhaven’s mage mistress, an Amell.

“You don’t like to be outshone,” Varric says. “She’s here, you said?”

Vivienne nods, an indication of her chin that expresses disdain even as she directs Varric’s eye.

There’s Starkhaven, on the dance floor all right. Varric must have been in the gardens during his particular introductory trumpet, or perhaps, for a change of pace, Sebastian had got here first. Imagine, a day of Sebastian Vael’s life that he doesn’t steal into the story too late and try to push it back in the opposite direction. Imagine, a Vael not spoiling the sport.

But this time Choirboy is game, and his hand is on the small of the back of the woman with whom he’s dancing. Varric looks at her, the upswept hair, the fine metalwork of her mask. “Sure that’s not one of yours?”

The woman’s gloves extend up her elbows. She doesn’t carry a staff; can’t, he supposes, if she needs both hands for dancing. She dances close to the prince, who is shorter than her by half a head. Mistress-close, her body flush to his on the turns; well, no better place than an Orlesian ballroom to be frank about such things. No judgment here—not about that, anyway.

The world is full of tall, pretty brunettes. Even tall, pretty brunette mages. Kirkwall is full of spare Amell cousins, full of pretenders, full of people willing to play at being ghosts and people willing to chase them.

He says, “I’ll talk to her.”

Vivienne raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t think court intrigues were your specialty.”

“It’s as if you’ve read none of my books.”

“I would never tell you that.”

Her teeth catch the light, edging against her full lips. He almost laughs; he has little to talk to her about in Skyhold but he likes her very much, here, now. Passing along her intrigues. Whether or not she knows to whom they really belong.

“Ever spoken to the prince?” he asks.

“No. I’m aware of his—” She pauses, the flash of smile disappearing. “His campaigns in Kirkwall.”

He cuts her off. “Let him bend your ear about his thoughts on the Chantry. You could find common ground, though, Maker, he’ll be so insufferable about his principles he might well persuade you to give yours up. Whatever he’s done to offend you—keep the offense, it’s a good sentiment—it won’t be for impiety’s sake that he’s done it.”

“Why then?”

Varric shrugs a shoulder. “Stupidity.”

The minuet comes to a finish with a flourish. The prince takes his companion by the hand. Varric watches them make their way out to the garden. “Come back to me at the end of the night,” he says, “and I’ll have a story to tell you.”

“I don’t doubt it,” says Vivienne. Her attention snaps, shifts, and she turns to greet a passerby in a sudden and dizzying flurry of Orlesian and kisses from a foot apart. Masks against masks.

Varric makes his way toward the garden.

He’d lied: it is impiety, no, profanation, that the prince is here at all. When he knows the army of Starkhaven sits assembled around the edges of his city—Hawke’s city—poor bleeding Kirkwall, poor Kirkwall with its heart’s seat empty; it is obscenity enough that Varric himself is here and not there, but don’t you think he knows it? If the prince is going to bring the city to its knees, he should be there to wield the sword, to threaten the killing blow.

Hypocrisy recognizes hypocrisy. Both of them are intruders here, both traitors to their home. Sebastian writes letters monthly, if not weekly, of just what he plans to do to the city, in the politest and most blessed of terms: his harms are conditional, of course, and so easily remedied. The siege might end tomorrow if someone were to give up Hawke. No, not even Hawke. _Find the apostate_ , that’s the one term. Not a particularly congenial atmosphere for bargaining, but Varric has never felt congenial toward the prince. Varric has dreamed since before the war of sinking his fist into Sebastian Vael’s pious smile, of displacing a few of those shining teeth.

He makes his way out into the garden. Out here, the crowd mills in the light of a thousand candles, the cloud of a thousand roses, speaking a thousand secrets. Relatively few to his purpose, if he had to guess. There are many topics of gossip in the Orlesian court—the Inquisitor, for one, and her general, her ambassador, her mage and her sky-castle and her rumored infinity of spies and the agony of light she carries in her hand, knuckles closed tight and ever-ready to punch at the sky. There’s the Empress, and her mistress, and her uncle. The scrapping among the Marcher cities is low on the list. No one is watching the prince particularly closely.

Sebastian Vael was never much fun at parties, at least ones he and Varric attended together. Here, again, he stands apart from the crowd. His mouth is by the masked woman’s ear, his hand on her waist. Allegedly he’s married now—that intelligence, Varric has from the court’s own parchment mouth, as well as from Leliana’s birds. The princess consort back at court with child as the prince rides out on campaign. And the ambassador rides with him, darling weapon of the Starkhaven court, all frostbite and firelight. Up close, she’s tall and lovely, lush lips bare beneath the mask and a square jaw he recognizes from the Amell lineage he knows. Garrett’s jaw. His sister had had the same.

The ambassador of Starkhaven wears a low-necked deep-blue dress with pale frost-blue lace, the fine weave of its pattern scrolling over her like traces of lightning. Magic is tangible around her, all the moreso since she’s not carrying any staff to focus her spells. Varric can feel it in the air, cutting clean through the perfumes of the garden. His head spins. He doesn’t account the effect to the wine.

“Choirboy,” he says.

“Viscount.”

Sebastian gives him a tight nod.

“And your lovely companion?”

Before Varric can greet her, Sebastian steps toward him, blocking the path and the view. He’s not wearing white these days. Starkhaven finery it is, now, with an unsurprisingly pretentious little coronet to cap it off, but the Andrastean codpiece is still shining up from his kilt. The holy mission, the righteousness, still casts enough light to blind.

“Have you reconsidered your stance?”

“It’s not good manners to bring up blackmail at a party.” Varric manages a grin, if only because Choirboy never could play the game. “Unless it’s new blackmail with secrets you’ve learned here. Then it’s fair game, of course.” And he has the satisfaction of watching Sebastian blink. He looks to the side, but it’s no good: the great white whale of their battles past is still standing smack-dab in his way. “You’re not going to introduce me to your guest?”

“If nothing has changed, then we have nothing to discuss,” says Sebastian. “Not here and not there.”

“Masterful policy,” says Varric. “Nuanced as ever.”

The prince is unmoved. And the ambassador stays where she is. Several theatrical options run through Varric’s head, including rushing under the prince’s kilt, but after making a show about subtlety—maybe not.

And, if he’s right, he’d rather be right in private.

So, a private gamble it is. Making his way back to the estate, he flags down one of the maids between rounds of wine and small cheeses and whispers a thing or two in her ear. She nods, they part, and he makes his way to his real home-away-from-home, even here in Orlais: the library. They have a painfully impoverished selection of romances. He makes a note to send the Empress a nice supply of books soon. The good kind.

It’s a fête in the Orlesian palace, so people pass through to kiss and whisper, but one of those flurries of feet is for him. He hears the catch of breath before he turns back around to see her, before she pushes into the stack, before she kneels and pushes up her mask, already confessing. She was never a good liar, the woman he recognizes. She was always throwing herself at assorted mercies and finding them ready to catch a sweet girl like her. Circumstances have changed, and the sweetness is harder to find: the color is not so high and bright in her face as it was. But the Blight will do that to a girl.

She is very pale but her face is the same echo of her brother’s, except for the eyes, which are her own. Wide and amber and, now, full of fear.

“You can’t say anything,” says Bethany Hawke.


	3. BETHANY

The Wardens had returned to Kirkwall, forces impressed in a time of need, and she’d come with them. Of course she had. General Stroud had even appointed her second in command, next to young Nathaniel Howe—Howe was more favored, of course, but this was her city and much as the Hawke name didn’t mean anything to the Wardens, circumstances did. She was meant to have known where she was going.

Well, she did.

So she was in the city when she saw the sky catch fire, when the Chantry burned, and she swore she heard a scream among the multitude that she recognized. Still, she wasn’t looking hard. She let her brother kiss her cheek and fought the surge of nauseous rage bound up with love when he did, and she fought at his side. Until no one was looking.

She’d heard the whisper—from Fenris, of all people, to Isabela—“Starkhaven’s gone.”

Her brother saved the city, saved his lover, saved the day. She knew what was happening as it happened. And they’d brought her back home, and aboveground, and the sky might have been lit aflame but it was still open over her head.

She fought. Up, up through the thicket, the battle at her back, pushing her feet up Kirkwall’s narrow slanting streets. Read the map as you go. Fight til the enemy lines grow thin—til you thin them. So, when the alleys grew sidewalks and pavings and broadened wide enough for her to swing in a circle with her staff out, she understood where she was. It was always the nobles that walked with room to breathe.

Every house bearing the banner of its own crest. Looking up as she cast, she watched the banners fray, with magic, with frost. Her mouth was full of corrupted lyrium, her vision fraying at the edges with red, red. Everywhere, in the air, underfoot, as if the city bled it with every cut. And there were cuts aplenty. The noble quarter cobbles had been white, once. She could make marbled flashes out under the grime, the blood. More red than white, now. Overhead every stripe of fabric was slashed, every house under siege.

When she saw the red bird on the flag, she thought briefly that she was hallucinating, that the red lyrium had entered her veins and her senses. But no: she’d simply never seen her family’s home here. And the house silhouetted magnificently behind the flag could belong to them—must have done. Lavish enough for the Champion’s family. Large enough to encompass the scope of that good Amell lineage, for which her brother had never given a damn. She had dreamed of ladyship, once; she hadn’t been able to see the estate while the family lived. She hadn’t even been able to see her mother’s face at the news.

She hadn’t seen her mother at all.

And she was fighting, still, but at the edges of the fray and the streets were broad and the air was thick with dirt and magic in her mouth. She sucked in a breath and looked around her and saw rabble, not warriors; siege and panic, not noble battle. Stroud was far from her, Howe lost somewhere in the poorer quarters. Kirkwall was not large, but it was not so small that one little girl couldn’t slip from the fray. There were eyes on every mage, but they weren’t looking for her now, not when she wasn’t Kirkwall’s any longer. The battle hid her, and the blue uniform gave her a reason. This was freedom, perhaps, when worn over the surface of the earth.

She felt her hands shaking. Small good she was to the fight like this. Every swallow of breath a sharper knife than the one before; who needed enemies when you could conspire against yourself so neatly?

Hang it. That was her house. That was _her house_ , and though she may never have walked through its door, its shadows belonged to her by right of birth. She slipped beneath the awning, beneath the vast pillar that cordoned off its broad steps and there she found a patch of quiet; there, in the quiet, she found, though she was not particularly seeking this out either, that it was easy to cry.

Of course it was easy. There was a war on.

Still.

There was a footprint, muddy, standing out against the ochre paint of the door. Looters, she wondered, or her brother’s friends. Either way, pretext.

A door open, a door shut, and here: Bethany Hawke, hiding at home again.

The hallway opened around her, vast and neglected. She could not imagine Garrett choosing tapestries, and her mother’s touch could only last so long. The carpet was muddy underfoot and she could not tell if it had been filthied by intruders or simply by her brother and his friends. This was a house of carelessness, made for the door to yawn eternally open, to invite in uninvited guests. There was dust on every table, even in the thick of battle. She strapped her staff to her back and drew a fingertip over a nearby table, a vase with red birds painted on the porcelain. Slowly. By the time she reached the table’s far corner, her finger wasn’t shaking. Two tears had fallen into the dust, but no more. There was comfort in the desolation here: this was nobody’s home. If it wasn’t a home without her, then it didn’t matter so much that she’d never had the chance to visit, that she’d gone unmissed.

The door was still open behind her, letting in the distant roar of the battle. She did not hear footsteps.

She heard the soft pluck of a bowstring, the whisper in the air.

Before she could grab her staff back, she felt an arrow shock into motion and her skin awoke to the disturbance in the air. A circle of frost formed underfoot, crackling outward from her feet. The arrow glanced to the side; she ducked to one knee, resting light on one foot as she flipped the staff from her back and cast outward, into the shadows. The frost, guided, shot forward into a bolt, and she felt herself reaching forward with it. One foe was nothing—today, where battles fought in legion on the streets and now, after years of trudging against the darkspawn. She was exhausted but her skin had hardened and her power was sparking to light beneath it.

The frost had hit, turning the frame of the door cold-blue. She saw another arrow-tip prodding its way around the corner. “Who’s there?” she asked. Her eyes ached from squinting in the shadows, from not crying. Lanterns danced at the edges of her vision. Only one, it had to be, she would have heard more. A lone enemy, then, and nonmagical, more prey than peer.

A hoarse voice, behind the wall. “Where’s your brother?”

Familiar, thick with Starkhaven brogue. She felt her throat go dry.

“Sebastian?”

The prince of Starkhaven stepped out from behind the corner and let the harsh red light from the streets outside glanced over an armor that was not so white as it had been. “Where is he?” he asked, not lowering his bow. His arrow pointed toward her throat.

It was not fear that parched her mouth when she tried to speak. “Outside,” she said. “Fighting the Knight-Commander, or maybe he’s killed her by now—what do I know?”

“You don’t fight with him?”

“I came to,” she said, “but I can hardly see him from here.”

She had not seen him since she had gone back into the Deep Roads—for good, she’d thought, the second time round—and she had not imagined seeing him like this. In the base of her throat, and vivid in her wrists, she felt her heart beat, but her hands did not shake. She had not returned to the surface to lower her guard.

“His lover,” said the prince, “that mage, saw the chantry burn. My home—” His voice cracked, briefly, and she heard how ragged he sounded, as though he had been screaming through the smoke. “And still your brother keeps him. He won’t see him tried, but I will.”

Guard up, she thought. “I’d heard you left the fight,” she said, “not that you took up arms against him. So you’re no longer friends.”

“Not after tonight,” he said. “I’ll see the mage dead for this.”

“The mage,” she echoed. The frost she had cast on the floor was still keen and slick underfoot.

“ _That_ mage,” he said, and she saw him look at her for a brief true minute, eyes vivid and blue, and she felt her mouth burn. He had kissed her, once, and she him; it had been a fair exchange. So they owed each other nothing, so he had his aim on her now, so she did not lower her staff.

Her brother had brought her to the city. His letter to the Wardens, the Champion’s decree. Him, she owed. Should have owed. Certainly she should have defended him against anyone declaring themselves to be his enemy.

“My brother abandoned me to die under the earth,” she said. “You know that. You were there.”

Yes: it was Sebastian who blinked first, and he let the tip of his arrow point to the floor, though he came short of un-nocking the shaft. “And what will you do now?” he asked, quiet, his voice somehow more dangerous without the arrow pointed at her throat. “When the fires of Kirkwall are put out, will you return to Ferelden in quiet?”

She lowered her staff, slowly. He didn’t need to know how ready she was to cast, how magic-drunk she felt, suffused with the polluted glory of Kirkwall’s red-lyrium air. Poison was in her mouth, her veins, her power—but what was new about that? Poison tainted her heart, her dreams, kept her from the sun. Kirkwall, afire and aglow, was the light she deserved.

It was a dangerous thing, she said, and she did not say it to him so much as to herself: “No one’s looking for me, now are they?”

“What will you do?” he asked again, and she felt her hands tremble.

“I’m here,” she said instead of an answer. “I’d never seen my home before. Ours—the Hawkes’—”

He put down the bow. She watched him strap it to his back, and only when she saw it fastened did she let herself do the same.

How lightly he moved. She noticed the absence of sound more than the motion, until he was near her, until his hands were reaching out, until he took her near-empty hands, and one of the awful sobs that had nested in the base of her throat broke free at his touch. With shocking vividness, she recalled the callouses on his fingertips and the smoothness of his palms. Still smooth. Even now.

“Come with me,” he said, ridiculously.

She _was_ drunk. Red lyrium made you see things, hear things. Things you wanted. Things that would burrow under your skin. Under your tongue.

“Bethany,” he said with such slow-dawning astonishment, such instant conviction, in a voice she’d let herself hear in the very darkest moments down in the Roads. All right, it was him, he was in the room with her all right, but what was she meant to say to that? _I’ve dreamed of you, just like you found me last, in my tent, my hand between my legs. My brother’s city is on fire and all he cares about is that it’s his and he’s in love. He’s lost to both of us. And I’m lost to the world._

“Andraste forgive me," he said, his hunting prayer, his killing prayer, the thing he said before kissing her last time. And he reached for her, and she was fluent in his arms, and there was a purpose to the intoxicating fire in her veins.

How incongruous and selfish it felt to burn, set against the fires of the night. Kirkwall set itself afire outside the window while within, Sebastian Vael pressed her flush against the wall of a home that had never been hers. She felt the dust of the Hawke furniture on her hands as she pressed them to his face, as she tangled her fingers in his hair. He had kissed her so gently before, and she had been soft and fragile when she’d received it. They were not so breakable now; it was the world that broke around them as they kissed, fierce and hungry, at the end of the world.

She came away weeping, to her shock. She hadn’t wept since she’d gone underground. Coming out, she’d wondered if the sight of the sun would break her heart, but her heart was clad up in Warden-blue armor and her freedom was bound up in the same. Now, though, his hand was on her face; salt and ash were on her lips. The tears in her mouth were his as well—the burnt-earth taste, the iron of fear on her tongue, all shared communion.

His thumb caught the dampness beneath her eye, and the look on his face was raw. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maker, I’ve prayed for you.”

She might have laughed. “And I for you. When I had a moment, between all the killing.”

“You should never have been forced to a life like that,” he said with ridiculous fervor. Perhaps it was easy to care for her when the rest of the options were so grim—the burnt chantry, whatever Anders had done. Her brother. “A girl like you should have been kept safe no matter what.”

She could have spat on the floor. “That’s what my brother tried to do. Keep me safe. Well, it kept me from learning, didn’t it? Perhaps if he hadn’t been keeping me safe at home all those years I might have fought better the first time round. The darkspawn can hardly touch me these days.”

The eyes, wide, blue, helpless. The sky she remembered, which seemed to have gone missing everywhere else. “I only meant that you deserve—” His hands took in the room around them, the finery. “This, all of this, more. What Hawke—what Garrett got.” The sky clouded. “More.”

She didn’t want to touch that darkness, not yet. She did, despite her, want to touch the velvet chairs, the flocked wallpaper. It _was_ hers. She was Leandra Amell’s daughter, perhaps more than she had ever been Garrett Hawke’s sister, and he would have worn that life lightly, she knew: ballgowns and invitations, her hair curled and shining against her shoulders. If they had let her out to live it.

“I’ve never seen the upstairs,” she said.

He gave her a clever, careful look. “You should take what’s yours,” he said. “Your house—if you’re leaving—you’ve belongings here, I don’t doubt.”

Jewels, then. Gems, rings, the family seal. The component parts to assemble a self out in the world. He knew better than most.

“You’ve been here,” she said. “I never have. Show me.”

It was easy to follow him to the broad stairs of the house’s central staircase, and up, dusty rose-velvet muffling their footsteps. As they walked, the sound of distant explosions shook the steps, and the openness of the house amplified the shriek and clatter of the outside battles. Ghosts were in the room with them, those of the dead and of the living. As far as she knew. Someone could have cut the Champion down without her knowing tonight, and she would never know it, so far from the front lines. She didn’t believe it, but she felt it burrow into her, an apple-worm coring her heart.

But when they were upstairs, her brother’s room was deep in the heart of the house, and the draperies of the Champion’s bed were so soft they seemed to blot out the sound, and she was acutely aware, once they had closed the door, of the two of them alone in the room. Only her and the prince of Starkhaven and a desk with the family seal shut up inside.

In silence, she opened the drawer of the desk. Papers, smudges of ink on the written and the blank, bottles left open to dry or to spill, wax half-melted and partially imprinted with the ring. And the ring, lolling around.

She looked at it for a terribly long time.

In the end, it was Sebastian, standing at her side, who picked it up, and when she reached out for it, he caught her hand. His fingers, light and deft, unclenched her fist, stroked warm and sure over her palm until it was open and waiting.

He did not place it in her hand. Instead, he slid it onto her finger.

She felt it slide, slightly overlarge. There was wax stuck to it. None of it mattered. Sebastian Vael had not let go of her hand. The room was quiet, too quiet, far too quiet for war. The sound of their breath in the room seemed an injustice, frivolous. The heat of her skin a profanation of her cause. Whatever cause she was meant to be upholding.

“You’re an Amell,” he said, voice oddly loud. “If you like. You can take your family with you, and you can be anything. You’ve the choice of it.”

The choice.

She looked up and chose the softness of his mouth, the exhaustion in her bones, the way her skin woke up against his. Half-helpless, more sensation than woman, she kissed him again and felt the rage and grief in him as he kissed her back. His hands crushed against her shoulders, so ardent she could feel his grip through the armor.

Armor was a problem. His vows would live another day. But Maker, it was good to answer him roughly, to grab at his neck, to pull him close until she had one of the posts of her bed at his back. The door was shut behind them, and she felt blood-certain in her heart that she both could and would kill anyone who walked through the door. That was new. He was kissing a different girl than he had before.

But the same one, beneath the armor, before the skills. He had known the gentleness and true belief, the stories and the sunlight. He might, she thought, understand the bitterness that had crept into her blood alongside. The new strength and the old dreams. The Amell seal was on her finger. The prince of Starkhaven kissed her, her mouth and her cheeks and the soft crevice beneath her jaw, and she let herself dream.

He had been so pure before, so kind and good, her brother’s brightest companion, the one most willing to treat her like a princess. She’d been bitter then, too. But so much better at hiding it. Now, armored and calloused and robbing her brother’s house under Sebastian’s watchful, deliberative eye, she felt less inclined to hide it. He still kissed her like she was precious, like she was delicious. He let himself taste her this time. Minutes before his arrow had been pointed at her throat. Moments mattered more, this time.

“Come,” he gasped against her lips, only half-sensible, “Maker, come with me, take everything in the world you can call your own, take what you want, Bethany, take it all.”

“You,” she said quietly. It didn’t seem so much to ask at the time.

 

 

“Andraste’s ass, Bethany,” says Varric, “there’s nearly a war on.”

“Yes,” she says, “starting then. I didn’t say, _fuck me on the Champion of Kirkwall’s bed. Fuck me where Anders fucked my brother, in the war Anders made._ And he didn’t. Though he might have, had I asked.”

Varric stares at her.

“You're not what you were.”

No, she thinks. Several lifetimes lost. The war inside her was over before it began.

“You won’t say,” she says. She’d expected it to be a question. As it happens, it isn’t. “You won’t write to the Wardens. You won’t disgrace my brother with it. You’ll leave that to him. You keep his secrets, so you’ll keep mine.”

“I can’t believe you’d do this to him,” Varric says, and she feels her lips thin with contempt. They’d be so much happier if she’d stayed in her place—forgotten in the dark, tale told to its tragic conclusion. _Sunshine_ , Varric, she thinks with a bitter smile. She’s found her way to the light in the end after all, and he can write the tale through or turn his back on it. She knows which he’ll do, whatever he says, however he feels: he chooses his audience, and he’d never let Garrett learn this story secondhand.

Well, brother, she thinks, you protect me after all. More than ever now that you’ve run off and left me.

“Don’t you trust me to advise him wisely?” she asks.

“I think he’s beyond advisement.”

“Is that why you won’t respond to his letters?” she asks and sees a new flare of anger in his eyes.

“The _ambassador_ didn’t respond to ours.”

“Of course she did,” snaps Bethany, “ _she_ just didn’t choose to place herself in the lion’s mouth. If you want a diplomatic alliance, send yours to Starkhaven.”

“I hear the prince of Starkhaven is on the move with his troops,” Varric replies sharply. “Is that your good advice at work?”

She takes a breath.

She has made her choices.

“I trust his intentions,” she says, and it is only somewhat of a lie. His intention is to keep her safe, after all. The rest, she can’t say. Not to Varric, with the twin holes in his heart—one in the shape of a man, one in the shape of a city, both of them looking so much alike.

Varric turns from her.

“No,” he says. “I won’t spread the word that you’re Bethany Hawke. You’re not.”

The Ambassador of Starkhaven watches the viscount of Kirkwall leave the library of the Winter Palace and does not look down until he has left. The viscount of a city that hates her, she might have said, but the ambassador does not discuss her sentiments on political ground.

Bethany Hawke twists the Amell signet on her finger and returns to the fête.

 


	4. SEBASTIAN

_Andraste is kind,_ Sebastian had thought, and it had been an absurd thought, but all faith was absurd and he was glad to learn he had not lost his in the battle. _There is always a saviour_.  

He had grieved Elthina desperately, instantly, but he had been a fool to doubt Her eye: Andraste had died by fire, after all. She claimed her servants. Even the mage acted under Her direction, will he or no.

They are all Her servants. And She sent him the greatest message of them all. Her guide on this earth, with fire at her fingertips. Indestructible, almost.

The problem, then, was practical. First, leaving Hawke’s home. Bethany with her belongings; he reminding her that they _are_ hers, understanding the perils and necessities of nobility better than most. How many times in his life had the name of Vael and the signet of Starkhaven guaranteed a roof over his head? At least as often as it summoned the knife to his throat. So Bethany Hawke pocketed the Amell signet, and he, to the best of his ability, pocketed Bethany Hawke. As they walked, she kept close to his side, her eyes cast down and her chin dipped low enough that her mailed cowl nearly hid her mouth.  (Let him not slow his stride, considering her mouth.)

Bethany Hawke has always been an ember in him, in a fire that persistently refuses to die.

 

 

He is halfway up the stairs of the Winter Palace when he sees her at the head, emerging from the library. The dwarf is nowhere in sight. He runs to her—one servant ducks out of his way; a wayward elbow might have sent a tray crashing—the prince of Starkhaven forsakes his dignity, these gossips might say. But they don’t talk about him now. They have more to say elsewhere. And how grateful he is, as he meets her, his hand already reaching for her elbow, where the skin is bare above her glove. She is wrapped in lace, under which he can see every flush and freckle. She is real, beneath the lace, which he knows, from his hand.

“What did he say to you?” he demands.

The ambassador of Starkhaven twists her lips to the side, beneath the iron intricacies of her Orlesian domino. “Nothing of note. It was a friendly greeting, Sebastian—or in any case, it started as one.” 

“I am not on friendly terms with Viscount Tethras.” 

The lips untwist, laugh, even. He can see her eyes, just the eyes, behind the mask, tired and amber and not quite laughing along. “No, you’re not, and whose fault is that? But he does not think of me as yours,” she says, and something runs through him, sharp and swift and invisible. 

“He hasn’t seen you in years,” he says. “He can hardly claim to know you, even as you were—”

“No,” she says tightly, “he cannot. He thinks well of the name Hawke, so let him place me among the Hawkes. That doesn’t make it true.” 

There is no one around, not even another servant to unbalance. No one to watch as her other hand reaches up to brush lightly over his face. Subtly, she adjusts the way the coronet has shifted on his temples—he must have unbalanced himself, too—and only then does he realize how tight it had sat askew. He breathes, deep, as if relearning how.

“Let them have Bethany Hawke,” whispers the woman who had been Bethany Hawke, tilting her forehead down to his. Close enough for him to feel the whisper on his lips. “You have me.” 

 

 

The fires had dwindled to the better part ash once they left, ceding to sunrise, the blood in the streets half-dry. Without Hawke, he was friendless in Kirkwall—and his companion, as a Hawke, potentially overburdened with friends.  He could think of exactly one name that joined to his, not Hawke’s, first.

Fortunately, the name was bound to a debt. 

The Harimann estate had never quite recovered from its haunting. Given this, the battle had hardly made a dent on the house: the smoke on the window glass and red footprints on the path fit its nature. When he knocked, the sun was half-risen, blood painting the sky along with the streets. A servant took time answering the door—but it was answered, they were ushered in, and when the door closed behind them, their steps and sounds were swallowed at once by the vast quiet of the interior.

Destruction had not come calling here that night. There was never any reward in destroying a wreck. 

They were seated in the receiving chamber, on a waiting sofa of more-faded red. He showed his ring; the footman left, as speechless as he had come. Bethany, too, silent at his side. When he took her hand, in the servant’s absence, he felt how cold it was. Beneath her eyes were smudges of deep violet. It had been a long night. It had been several long years.

More servants brought lukewarm tea. Perhaps it wasn’t fear that cooled Bethany’s hand, which did not tremble in his.  The air in the room was unforgiving, but when Flora Harimann arranged herself across from him her eyes offered banked warmth. She sat in her receiving-chair, in her dressing gown, looking less and less like the girl he remembered and yet, for all that, reassuring. She had the Harimann proud-bridged nose, the blue eyes.

“I would offer something stronger,” she said, “but you know our reserves are not what they were. And I suppose it’s early, but time and decorum seem to matter less after nights like these.”

He thought of the last time he saw her, perfumed with cognac, drunk in the presence of the demon that had possessed her family. Since, she’d written him such lovely, sensible letters that he’d let himself forget: t ime and decorum were myths here. Her mother had suggested he marry this woman, once, when she had believed he had any kind of court decorum worth the mention. How old had he been, then—fourteen? A child, already corruptible. A year later, unworthy of her, of all of this. And he never had a demon to blame.

“By some miracle we’ve lived another day,” she said, “we displaced remnants of Starkhaven. What do you want?”

“You’ve named it,” he said. “I need to leave here. I mean to return to the throne that awaits me.”

Her lips parted. He believed in her loyalty now, trusted her heart, knew that those fidelities would stoke her desire as much as anything. The Harimann line had always been close enough to taste the throne. Proximity breeds hunger. He never needed a demon to tell him that. 

He took Bethany’s hand again. Flora noticed; her face betrayed nothing.

“You could leave in glory,” she said.

“I don’t intend to,” he said. “I don’t need to impress Kirkwall, and there’s plenty here I’d rather not see in the crowd. I’d rather they didn’t see me go.”

He could feel Bethany’s nails against his palm. Don’t worry, he wanted to say. It wasn’t Kirkwallan eyes he was after. There’s only one set of knees in Kirkwall he needed bent to him—(Well, for a certain definition— _Enough of that,_ the voice inside him, practiced in shaming him, said)—no, not to him, anyway. To Andraste—Elthina—to the sacred flame and its sacrifices. Anders would be brought to justice; he must administer that justice; he must sit the judge’s seat; he must wear his crown to do so.

And the rest would have to follow. Throne, Starkhaven. The hand in his, a secret. No better place to keep a secret than in the heart of the state, where they were currency.

“I can help you,” said Flora. “I will have the servants make up a suite for you. You don’t need to leave in soiled armor and you may as well sleep and bathe. However you wish to do this, you won’t be on the road before I’ve written several letters.”

She rose, smiled, lips closed, hostess-kind. Even and especially where they did not have to be, her manners always were impeccable. Record of sin or no, he had never been worthy. “Starkhaven will be pleased to see you coming,” she said. “High and low.” 

Would they? He couldn’t envision it. The throne was his, by right and burden, and pleasure didn’t weigh into it, on one side of the scale or the other, his or theirs. Pleasure never mattered. He told himself. He did not release the hand.

The tea had gone to ice by the time he remembered it. Once the sound of Flora’s slippers had receded out of earshot, he heard Bethany exhale, minutely. “Are we safe?” she asked, and he felt the _we_ burned through him, a small exquisite spark.

“I’m not losing you,” he said.

 

 

_I’m not losing you,_ he thinks, again, his mouth on hers, in the Winter Palace.

“Have you been here before?” she asks, breathless, and he almost laughs.

“Orlesians don’t invite Marcher states to celebrate in peacetime.” Someday, they will close the sky in Thedas and his crown will be unimportant again. He longs for it. Starkhaven’s own problems are simpler, he thinks: funds for the church, criminals brought to justice, the quiet that comes after. “This is a wartime gala.”

Her expression dims slightly, as before, and he could kill her brother, his lover, and Tethras all at the same time for setting a toe on her mood. He touches her face delicately, thumb stroking soft under her jaw. “Why did you ask? I know it outshines home.”

“It’s not that.” He keeps a hand on her face and feels the smile curve her cheek. “If we must waken all our ghosts, I was wondering what the Prince of Starkhaven might have done in the estates of Orlais before he knew better, that’s all.”

She leans in again, mischief and conspiracy on her face. Unfathomable sweetness on her lips, delicate filth in the soft brush of her tongue. He has sworn to himself that he is not what he was—she never knew that particular prince—but she is not the uncomplicated girl that might have been ruined by a rake, had they met several incarnations ago. Nor are the delights of a prince, rakish or no, ever simple. She is his mistress, his ambassador, not his queen, can never be. The dizziness he feels in her presence is, has always been, a profound indictment of his focus, an abdication of his responsibility. The rake had a simpler time of it.

Acceding to path of filth is easier. And has never stopped being delicious. He lets himself spin her, swift, against the balcony, until her spine is flush to the nearest pillar. It throws the thinnest veil of secrecy over them. She has always been maddeningly beautiful, veiled. He kisses her jaw beneath the domino mask,  lets him move his hand from jaw to throat to shoulder, skin warm beneath the lace, to the rising curve of her breast.

The secrecy is an indulgence. No one would think anything of this here, in the beating heart of Orlais. The sickness he feels at the thought is somewhere between repugnance and desire. 

“I’ve never known better with you,” he says.

Her mouth opens, lush and inviting, against his. Being matched, passion for passion, has never ceased to terrify him; the floor dropped away at the start of the evening, when he led mage and runaway Warden Bethany Hawke on his arm into the grandest estate in Thedas and no one told him no. No one has told him no in years, not since Kirkwall, not since the destruction of Thedas, not since reclaiming the throne—not anyone with moral authority, anyway. What has he ever been without someone to tell him what’s right? 

Exactly as he is now, is the answer. Andraste preserve him, the only right thing he can think now is that with his hand gone he can kiss her throat, but not _enough_  of it, stymied by the high lace neck of her gown. His mouth on bare skin is the only recognizable moral imperative he knows, now. The edge of her neckline, the only limit.

Bethany’s breath catches; he feels it under the skin. “In another lifetime my mother was invited here,” she says, voice a little too high, a little too swift. “Imagine if I, too—imagine if _we_ —”

He can imagine it, suddenly, vividly. When he felt less, in a world where she’d never need to carry masks or scars. They wouldn’t have agonized over it, he thinks. Simply a beautiful young lady and a rash young prince, meeting in a court that permits everything and forbids nothing.

His hand presses flat to the pillar, beside the curve of her waist. He can see them, as they might be, just like this. With so very little to lose.

“You deserve to be fucked in no less than the Empress’s own bed, Lady Amell,” he would have said, so he does say, and she sighs like she’s already prone on a canopy of satin.

 

 

 

Deferential to protocol, Flora placed them in the largest suite in the Harimann estate. She did not have to explain her choice. It was not the first time he had seen the master suite of her home; her parents had slept in this room, her mother had died in it, and he was not surprised to learn she preferred to give it to strangers.

The desire demon had died here with his arrow in its throat.  No one had slept in this bed since, hi imagined. Lord Ruxton Harimann had left, Flora said, for Starkhaven—to make amends, then, to clean up court and Circle. “For your sake,” Flora had said, softly, pressing Sebastian’s hand, “as much as yours. Your concerns are ours, and ours for you.”

Lord Harimann, he knew for an upright and pious man by nature. Sebastian had admired him more than liked him, had wished closer kinship with his spirits for a time. Then, of course, he had seen him stripped bare at the desire demon’s bequest, and he was glad not to have to look him in the eye now. Least of all, like this, grimed with war and grief, enamored with a fugitive, blessed in his own apocalypse. He had rarely felt more purely Andrastian, nor less able to present himself to a Circle. 

The blood had been scrubbed from the peach and gold tile. The sheets of the bed had been cleared of smoke. A servant had lit the brazier by the time he and Bethany were ushered inside; unnecessarily, he thought, in a time when he could still see fires outside the window. Smoke choked the corners of the room, and on the bedside, sweet sandalwood had been set to burn. When he blinked, red spots faded in and out of the edges of his vision, haunting half of war and half of the Fade. Blood had spilled in this room—you could smell it, feel it, taste it, even if you hadn’t been there for the killing. Demon blood. In the next room, the servant was drawing a bath.

Bethany sat down uneasily on a curved wooden bench, looking around, carefully not catching his eye. Only when he looked away could he sense her gaze on him, drawing the hairs up along the back of his neck. “You’re intimates,” she said at last, carefully, “you and the Lady Harimann.”

“They’re Starkhaveners,” he said. Then: “Childhood friends.” Then at last: “Her mother murdered my family.”

A soft breath. “And you are their guest.”

 “I killed the mother.”

“You are their _welcome_ guest.”

“I killed the demon she’d sworn to while I was here. As did—” _Your brother._ “Viscount Hawke. Garrett. Helped me.”

It hurts to admit how much it had meant at the time. How much credit he had given to Hawke’s kindness, his infinite generosity, which extended to his company and his cups as well as his killing. But Hawke was a fool, led by his cock as much as his sword, and he’d let the mage blow Kirkwall to the heavens rather than forsake his desires. His generosity meant nothing.

And he’d left Bethany to die, slowly, beneath the earth. That too didn’t merit forgiving. He saw white lines form around her mouth, saw her measure her reaction, saw her choose not to share it.

“Warden Hawke,” he said, “I’m sorry,” and her eyes on him were instantly furious.

“You can’t say that,” she said, swift and forceful. “Ever again.”

“But I _am_ sorry—”

“I doubt Hawke goes by Viscount. And I would not go by Hawke or Warden if I wished to keep my head.”

Her lips pressed shut, an abrupt closed door he found himself desperate to unlock. “I beg your infinite pardon,” he said. In two strides, he crossed the room to her; in half a heartbeat, he was kneeling. Her hands in his were battle-hardened, rough and cold to the touch. Andraste had led wars too, he thought.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “Prince—”

“Never to you,” he said. “I will be Sebastian to you and you will be—whatever you like. You’ve entrusted me with your safekeeping. I mean to honor it.”

Her eyes were still guarded, still measuring. “You could still go back,” he said, desperately, wanting to see her settle, not knowing what it would take. Perhaps it would take losing her. Neither of them had broken oath all the way, not quite yet. “The Wardens will still be camped outside of town, or in the inns. They would not think ill of you, you know.”

Her hands tensed in his, and her voice was harsh and clear. “I will not.”

He would keep her name as a favour, he thought, close to his heart and his own, alone. Sacred in its secrecy. Against her knuckles, he bent his forehead.

“ _Please_ , get up,” she said, softer now. He was considering whether to kiss her hand or castigate himself when the chamber door opened.

“The bath is drawn, milord. Milady.”

So the servants hadn’t been told, he thought. A necessary precaution, and a measure of freedom. “Take the first,” he said, and after a moment of weighing him, she took her hands from his.

“As you will.”

The door closed behind the servant, and Bethany stood. As he watched, she loosed the leather thong tying back her hair and let loose a matted coil of dark waves that slid down to the nape of her neck. His mouth was full of the many kinds of smoke trapped in the room, but he swore he could smell Circle ash, a peculiar and specific mix of incense and sela petrae, as she shook out her hair. She moved to unfasten her staff from her shoulders, her dagger from her thighs, unbuckling her belt from her hips and the clasp at her chest. Leather and mail and dirty blue cloth slid to the floor, until she was standing in her heavy leather trousers and a thin, sweat-damp linen shirt. He had not thought about the body beneath the armor. Not at length, anyhow.

He had weathered the company of Isabela with ease, visited the Rose at Hawke’s side with no particular joy, but now his mouth went dry as Bethany tugged off her boots and the loose linen collar of her shirt slipped from one shoulder.

It was his turn, when she looked up, to look away. His eyes stayed on the floor until t he leather trousers, soldered to the lush curve of her hips, found their way into his vision.

“If you can’t look at me,” she said very quietly, “I may as well give myself back to the darkspawn.”

He lifted his gaze and found hers steady. “I will think about who I am to be as I bathe,” she said with quiet dignity. “You may think about the same thing.” 

As she bathed. Yes, he thought, as she left, he would consider that devoutly.

 

 

In the Winter Palace, the Prince of Starkhaven half-runs through the cleared hallways of the imperial bedchambers, his consort hand in hand with him. Now he presses her to the flowered wallpaper to claim a kiss; now, a corridor later, it is she who clasps him behind the nearest corner. 

Several bedchambers are closed and locked, some enchanted, some audibly occupied. Empress Celene’s is guarded, and there is still much to lose if they try anyone’s patience enough to pull attention. Yet one door opens easily to the deft persuasion of a rogue’s fingers and a mage’s encouragement, and it is Bethany who locks this door, who seals the lock in frost. Inside is ice-blue satin as far as the eye can see, a color Bethany favors, a color that echoes her lace tonight. Beneath the lace, a flush rises, heating her from the heart out. Her hand is still on the lock as he presses her to the door, feeling the cold of her spell and the heat of her skin with equal clarity. She could light him aflame at a thought. And she does.

He has never considered her a mistress—she is more than that; a sacred responsibility and a divine protection and a living testament to all he has both won and lost in the Marches—but being in Orlais gives him an all-too-clear sense of what it is to _have_ a mistress. To keep her, what to do with her.  Satin and lace and fizzy wine and an absence of complication. She is already peeling off one glove. There, beneath, is her beautiful bare arm, her intent hand. He can only catch it for a moment, to kiss palm and wrist, before she has slipped it from him. His hands are not as swift with her as they are with a lock. Perhaps it’s only that he trusts her intention, which slides down the flat of his damasked vest to the clasp of his kilt, down to where the fabric parts.

Starkhaven lacks the permissiveness of Orlais, and yet their ceremonial garb leaves men bare underneath, vulnerable to a breeze, let alone these enchanter’s finger. Of course: Starkhaven is a living test of will. One he resolutely fails. She grips him and he can see himself in the tall ornate mirror of the room’s chifforobe, crown askew, mouth gaping. It is Starkhaven that paints his conception of the scene, even here: a ruin of a man with a witch’s hand on his cock.

He closes his eyes as she moves her hand. He would sacrifice kingdoms for this, yes.

“Are you happy tonight, Lady Amell?” he asks, and her smile is sudden, luminous, heartbreaking—and all too swiftly gathered back, behind an expression of focused heat.

“I have never been happier,” she says, with a liar’s determination, and drops to her knees.

He promised her the bed but she will make a liar of him, too, as she has and had and will continue to do, and as before, he will love it. Now he lets her draw the folds of his tartan back and he can only look down as she presses her lips to the crown of his cock and then opens her mouth. One hand slides, deft, between his thighs and back, and he feels the dangerous thrum of electricity in her fingertips— _Maker_. This is astonishing every time.

The public of Starkhaven credits the ambassador with inspiring great reforms of the Circle, persuading crown and kingdom to allocate its resources deftly. They have their queen at home and their war on a distant front and can admire policy written by a beautiful, ostentatiously powerful hand. Everyone knows policy is written in the bedrooms of Orlais as much as anywhere.

Politics are a balancing act. If she keeps doing that, he will be spent in a second, and where will the resources of the crown be then? He tries not to look at what she’s doing in the mirror, the way her gown spills into a satin sea around her, its waves threatening to swallow her entirely. His hand is in her hair, disturbing pins. The maid will find pins scattered in the carpet tomorrow, and if some of them have the Starkhaven crown jeweler’s mark etched into their diamond tips, she will keep them to herself as she pockets them. Gossip is valuable, but not yet enough to outvalue diamonds.

Bethany pulls back, lips lush and wet. When she looks up at him, he is caught in miniature in the luminous amber of her eyes.

“I promised you the bed,” he says, “didn’t I?”

“It’s true,” she says. “And you’ve never broken a promise yet.”

The bed is as silken and frilled and canopied as he’d placed his bets on, a cloud of white and blue flocked with the Orlesian lily seal. Empress Celene cannot possibly have one more inviting. Impossible to forget where they are. Impossible to remember who they are—which variants. Would the young Lady Amell, daughter to Leandra, have been so easily led, would she have parted her legs so willingly for what he had been? The variant of him that would have met her had always made compelling arguments. She’s said she would have. Her eyes would not have been so lambent, though, he thinks, so knowing. It would have been the first time he had her, not the five hundredth. And yet, she is no less astonishing now, like this. Moreso, as she lies back against the sea of pillows, both arms bare now, gloves lost to the room,her slippers castoff casualties between door and bed. She looks at him, steady and at ease in her desire, as she reclines. 

He folds her skirts up, careful as he can, baring the sheer stockings that cling to her thighs. More lace, a tied ribbon covering the pale memory of a deep scar running from the bone of her hip to the softness of her thigh: that belongs to this one and the things that have happened to her, the runaway Warden and survivor of wars. Her and her alone. It hurts him to look at. He peels the stocking back and feels the muscle tense as he strokes her thigh. She has not been pressed to the front lines in a decade, but it would take so little for her to be stronger than him, even now. Her legs are so long, he thinks, pulling it to rest over her shoulder, and what’s between them has the worth of his throne. When he lets his fingers find what they seek, they find her soaking. When he lets his mouth follow, he thinks he can taste Orlesian wine.

 

 

 

They took turns bathing in the Harimann tub. In the lukewarm slosh of the water, he had tried not to consider her too deeply—her body where his had been, half-warmed, half-cleaned. A day like this was not meant to wash off cleanly in one go; he knew already he would leave Kirkwall carrying twice what he had brought.

The suite had just the one bed. Flora had made an assumption and he had not bothered to correct her. Ungentlemanly, he thought. If they were to divide chambers, he would leave the master to her. He had not broken faith with the Circle as yet. There was still time. He was not forsaken.

Bethany Hawke was curled in on herself in the bed wearing a borrowed dressing gown the color of rust. More ubiquitous dried blood. The demon hadn’t bled red. Remembering that made it easier to look at her in the bed.

“How are you faring?” he asked, a stupid question.

When she turned, he was conscious of the way the dressing gown slid over skin, the way the threadbare embroidery of the collar brushed low along her bare throat. _The Hawke family was born unselfconscious,_ he thought, and then, _forget that, she’s been soldiering her last ten years away, she has no binding to decorum,_ and then, _forget that too_. The runaway Warden, the viscount’s sister—neither could be carried forward. At the moment, she was simply a woman in the aftermath of war, and so much alone. That, he recognized.

He wanted to sit, so he stood. He wore only the linen towel they had left him in the bath, and he saw her eyes wander over his body, either helpless or simply unashamed. Where her eyes touched, his skin prickled, as though she had traced him with a fingertip, as though aching for her to do so.

“It would be a cruel thing,” she said, “to say I might be happy. I’m not, of course—but it’s something, to be aboveground. To see the sun rise.”

“It will not grieve you to leave Kirkwall again?”

She shuddered. “I hate it. It’s halfway to underground, being here. You can feel the walls closing in. _Listening_.”

“No one’s listening now,” he said. “You could do anything.”

Her glance up, through her lashes, was quick and almost coy. “You offered me more than I know how to take.”

“I hope you will see the sun rise over Starkhaven and like it better.”

“I’ve never been,” she said. “I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine except that it’s better than here, better than anywhere I’ve ever been. But I didn’t ask for the sun.”

The Kirkwall Circle was blast and dust, but Bethany Hawke sat clean and clear-eyed where once he’d killed a desire demon. S he moved nearer the edge of the bed, shifted her hips to let her legs extend to the floor. In his years at the Circle, he had tried to forget what it looked like when someone wanted him. In his years since he and Hawke and Varric had walked away from the Warden camp, he had tried to forget what her mouth had felt like under his. He had forgotten nothing.

He had looked into Andraste’s eyes every night before he had slept, in his room at the Circle, the tapestry over his bed capturing her face exactly as She felt Maferath’s blade pierce her heart. The longer Bethany looked at him, the more acutely he felt the edges of the blade.  Surely Andraste had crafted the sum of his desire, just as the Fade had crafted the punishment, as a reward. The Maker loved balance. Andraste had loved the Maker.

He sat. He turned his head and her kiss was there for the taking. The taste of ash had washed away between the two of them; the taste of grief lingered, but further off with every kiss. He felt hot and cold, her hair damp against his cheek, the air smoke-burnt around them, feverish. She made a sound against his mouth, arms winding around his neck, her face pressed to his until it was too close to kiss any further. Cheek to cheek, she might have wept, and so might he. Instead, his mouth moved from the corner of hers to her cheek to her neck, to the edge of the dressing gown. When he put his arms around her, the dressing gown slid from her shoulders like water.

He had dreamed of her—yes, he had—but her body was nothing akin to his dreams or expectations. He had forgotten in the laziness of the dreams that she hadn’t been kept in soft Circle protection, that she had been fighting since last he’d seen her. Winning, mostly, if she was here to show for it, but with victories wrought by tooth and nail. The muscles of her thighs were corded and hard, her skin mapped with scars. The text of a story he hadn’t yet read, much less participated in the telling; it had been written with a cruel pen. He closed his eyes and pressed his lips to her ribcage, where a white knot of scar tissue remembered a wound so raw and serrated he could feel the ridges, could almost fit his teeth to them. He couldn’t heal it, but he felt her shiver, and the shiver consecrated the kiss. 

Another deep slash had bitten into her hip, this one the work of a blade. It led low and long, slicing into her thigh, and when he reached the end of it, her sigh was punctuation, salvation. He felt his desire a distant, ignored wound; he couldn’t think about that now. There was time. There would be an end to this. But every agony had a purpose. His mouth dipped back to the scar, then up. The air in the room was close, electric. When he kissed his way up and dipped two fingers into the core of her, it threatened to ignite. 

Someone in the room was praying. Perhaps they both were. _Maker, oh, Maker_ —

The walls were not listening. And since he had left the path of the rake behind, he had not forgotten anything.

 

 

Deep in the court of Orlais, he has her skirts up, her hips canted back, her hands clasped to the bedpost; he watches her wrists, her knuckles, go pale against the wood as he sinks deeper and deeper into her. Even like this, he feels that he can barely touch her. It takes nothing to peel his kilt up but beneath her skirts, only a few inches of her thighs are bare above the garters of her stockings, only as far as her waist. He pulls her hips close and closer in, until he is buried in her as far as he can go, until her stockinged legs press to his. Gasping, he presses a kiss to the back of her neck, beneath the winding coil of her hair.  Every hit of bare skin is warm agony, tantalizing, hard-won.

Raising his eyes, the prince of Starkhaven catches sight of himself in the mirror and the picture is humiliatingly familiar: his tartan hiked, his mistress’s hands raised in deference to pleasure. This paints a portrait of a lifelong habit. But then she makes a sound deep in her throat, arching against him, and every comparable image is destroyed.

“Maker, Sebastian,” she sighs, and he leans back in, hand curving her jaw, thumb on her lips, mouth swallowing her prayers.  Habit be damned. It’s a privilege to have learnt this: what she likes, and how to move her to hymn.

Her mouth is soft against his, but h er fingertips leave scrapings of frost against the wood.

It is a privilege, too, that she loves him enough to keep her hands from killing him.

 

 

Nothing had caught fire. They had that to say for themselves, at least. The mage hadn’t burnt down the world and the unchaste heretic hadn’t been struck down for breaking his vows. Very well. He lay beside her, spent and gasping, astonished. 

The world was new, and she was essential. As he lay by her side, he tried to understand himself, the self that could survive the newly-burnt world but could not be without her. Her hair was wet against his mouth; he kissed her temple, half-accidentally, because it was there.

She opened her mouth; he saw her lips form the shape of a title or two. “Sebastian,” she said, at length. 

“And what,” he said, carefully, “am I to call you?”

She considered it. Her hip shifted against his side and the words went from him, even _Bethany Hawke_.

“The Amell family has many branches,” she said, “all mage-plagued. Her cousin Revka was the first to bear mage children—she could hardly stop, bore five altogether. She’s gone now, you know. Disappeared without a trace. Any of her children might show up anywhere. Her first daughter, Avra, was older than I but her second might be my age.”

“A good name is worth much,” he said. “Even tarnished. I see nothing against my taking an Amell wife.”

Against him, she stiffened. “You don’t?”

When he did not respond, she took his hand and drew it over those scars that he had kissed, the slash on her hip and the one below her breast that looked so much like teeth. “If not the magic,” she said, “if not the lies, remember this. You must have heirs to inherit. I can’t help you.”

“I don’t understand,” he said—he didn’t—his hand on her skin made him stupid, even now. A thin sheen of sweat beaded her skin, but she was strikingly cool to the touch. Only to the surface, though. The juncture of her thighs was still fiercely, ardently warm.

She placed her fingertips, lightly, on his wrist, before he could slip his hand between them. 

“The Blight won’t allow it,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing in me but poison. _I_ can’t have heirs, and you must.”  

His hand lay on her thigh, as he was silent. “I cannot be without you now,” he said.

“You won’t need to be.” Her shrug shifted her whole body. Shoulder to thigh to curve of foot, the lines of her moved in subtle iterations against him, sendingout concentric ripples of heat beneath his skin. “You simply can’t _wive_ me. Keep me yours, speak the name we choose, but I can’t take the crown. I won’t make a country barren.

“One barren blighted rulership in Thedas is bad enough.” She sat up, and her fingers moved over the curves of his face as she looked down at him, as though she studied him in touch as well as sight. Her eyes were intent. “Rule for Andraste but don’t rule like a templar, with no regard for anything but sword and heart. Don’t let Starkhaven follow Ferelden.” 

Her fingertip skimmed from cheek to the hollow of his throat. He caught her wrist. “You will never have to return to Ferelden,” he said, his lips to her palm, and she sighed into the kiss in a way he already felt familiar. This time, when his hand slid between her legs, they parted to invite him in.

The would-be prince of Starkhaven kissed the woman he found in the Harimann bed until she stopped and he found that she was real, that she tasted of sweat and bathing oils and a desire that had nothing to do with demons. Her name did not matter, nor her place in the state. The tips of her fingers ignited against his skin until she threatened to char him and, Maker help him, he was hard again.

The world had not ended. He felt a future, a country, beginning. It would be sacrosanct in the making, he thought, with her body beneath his.

  

 

The Orlesians love a diplomat, Sebastian Vael thinks, sweat cooling on his skin. Beside him, Bethany lies back on the satin, her breath ragged but regulating. “Will the Empress be angry?” she asks, with time to move through the manners of caution now that her ecstasies have exhausted themselves (several times over).

She has not rearranged her skirts. The sheen on her thighs catches the candlelight. If he had been able to remove her dress, they would never leave this room. 

He rests his head against the unforgiving lace of her bosom. Exhaustion weighs on him, heavy as a stone to the crown of his head. Without needing to ask, she slides the coronet from his head and presses her fingers to his temples. Healing heat sinks beneath his skin, some magical, some simply the relief of her touch.

He closes his eyes and gives himself over—yet again—to the mercy of her hands.

“They’ve never chastised me yet.”

* * *

 

 

_ The retaking of Starkhaven was less bloody than expected, in large part because the prince returned wed to the queenmaker who had made Goran Vael the sitting puppet king. Goran, unmade, was convinced swiftly to abdicate to an estate on the eastern border, given an allowance and a heavy guard—for his own well-being, of course. _

_ The people’s fidelity was to the Vael line, and to a ground unwatered with blood. Cheers greeted the prince’s retinue at his coronation, uninterrupted in the public hearing.  A prince can choose his own retinue, and few questions were asked of the pale noblewoman that rode at his side, the shadows beneath her eyes, the mage’s staff at her back. A prince that could restore his throne through such deliberative arrangement of the nobility would be no less careful with the mages, of course. His would be a careful, decisive hand, one they trusted to remain steady even if he wished for a mage within reach. And he reached with the queen’s blessing matching his own. _

_ A prince is not expected to marry for love but for peace, and peace was maintained. When Lady Amell was made ambassador, Queen Flora was the first to toast her, the first to smile as Lady Amell lay her lips to the queen’s own cup and drank deep. As she would smile, calm and solitary in the throne-room, when the prince and the ambassador rode off to war, listening to the cheers of the crowd. _


End file.
